Mega Accepts Bitcoin; Email, Chat, Voice, Video, Mobile Coming Soon 143
An anonymous reader writes "Kim Dotcom knows how to stir up a storm on Twitter. On Saturday, he announced Bitcoin support for his cloud storage service and also sent out a slew of tweets suggesting Mega is going to become much more than just the successor to Megaupload."
filecloud (Score:5, Informative)
http://filecloud.io/ [filecloud.io] cloud storage site (with more features + cheaper than Mega btw) has been accepting bitcoins for a long time, and being an Irish company has to follow Irish+EU dataprotection laws
Re:Am I the only one... (Score:0, Informative)
Bitcoins are likely to be a more widespread alternative to the USD if and when enough of the users of it (10-20%) lose faith in the dollar due government/central bank mismanagement of monetary&fiscal policies. This is already happening, but on a small enough scale that it's barely a niche though (e.g. currency users switching to Bitcoin, but it is widespread knowledge that the dollar is being trashed and therefore faith in it is being degraded).
Re:filecloud (Score:2, Informative)
You can always encrypt your files yourself before you upload them.
Fiat money depends on promises (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Can't wait until my company can offer it! (Score:3, Informative)
If Bitcoin grows enough that the credit card companies are concerned about losing business, it will no longer be clear whether it is a better idea to drop Bitcoin, or to drop the credit card option.
Anyway, I'm not aware that credit card companies are threatening to block payments to companies offering PayPal. Why should Bitcoin be any different?
And besides, at least in Europe I'm pretty sure it would be illegal to credit card companies to do this.
If I were considering whether to accept payments by Bitcoin, I'd be more concerned about legal aspects than about whether the credit card companies would like it.
Re:Am I the only one... (Score:3, Informative)
You have that backwards. As more people use bitcoin, its distribution becomes increasingly limited which in turn will raise its value. Luckily its divisible to 8 decimal places. Once bitcoin is the same as 100 million satoshi's.
Bitcoin is taking off. Pay attention to it. (Score:5, Informative)
In the last 3 months: money supply expansion halved, number of merchants doubled, wordpress accepted it, US facing pokersite leaks they will accept it, largest gambling site profit up hundreds of %
If this stuff happened to any company, its share price would double.
Also, in the last year:
Network transaction fees per day are up 1100% from 4 to 48
Explosion in p2p exchanges for cash or bank transfers on sites like localbitcoins
Coinlab and BitPay each got 500k in venture capital. Coinbase got 100k.
Bitcoin Foundation Launched in September 2012
ponzi worth between 250k and 5mil collapsed
BitInstant lets you buy bitcoins at walmart, 7-11, and CVS
Silk Road is doing at least 2mil/month. Forum usage up hundreds of percent over last year.
A $10mil company will be releasing the BitcoinCard this year at the Vienna Bitcoin Conference. The Russian founders say 5 years of research have gone into this technology allowing a super-low-power credit card sized device to send texts, bitcoins, login info, and consumer data through an ad-hoc network instead of cell towers, at a card cost of only $10-$25
SatoshiDice has shown the potential of the bitcoin gambling market by earning $600k, including 17,266 bitcoins in December
Many companies in the bitcoin community have gone public.
Read the bitcoin FAQ: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/FAQ [bitcoin.it]
If you still have concerns, see if they are addressed in the "myths" section: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Myths [bitcoin.it]
Re:Fiat money depends on promises (Score:5, Informative)
"A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment operation that pays returns to its investors from their own money or the money paid by subsequent investors, rather than from profit earned by the individual or organization running the operation." [wikipedia.org]
"Ponzi scheme" is not a synonym for "something to do with money I disagree with". Stop using it as such. Bitcoin isn't a Ponzi scheme because it's not an investment scheme. Furthermore, since all the details about Bitcoin are publicly known, it's hard to see how it could be called a scam at all - there are no below-table dealings there.
"Ponzi scheme" is quickly becoming the Godwin of economic discussion.
While it's likely that deflation makes Bitcoin unsuitable as a currency, that doesn't make it a scam, just flawed.
Re:Fiat money depends on promises (Score:5, Informative)
The idea that deflation leads to depression was proven to be false [minneapolisfed.org] back in 2004. The "Bitcoin has a flawed economic design" argument is wrong and I will keep posting this study on Slashdot until it gets modded up and people read it.